A LEADING art gallery in Edinburgh is to receive nearly £400,000 from the arts charity founded by Elisabeth Murdoch.
Ms Murdoch founded the Freelands Foundation in 2015 to support artists, cultural institutions and broaden audiences for visual arts.
The foundation, a charity, is now to launch its new Artists Programme,which gives £1.5m to galleries and other bodies across the UK to help support emerging talent in the contemporary arts.
The Talbot Rice Gallery, a respected gallery that is part of the University of Edinburgh, is to receive £375,000 over a five year period and will provide support, materials and potential exhibitions for 20 emerging artists.
The other galleries receiving this five year investment include G39 in Cardiff, PS2 in Belfast, and the Site Gallery in Sheffield, Yorkshire.
The Talbot Rice, led by director Tessa Giblin, will shortly make an open call for artists to work with the gallery in the programme.
The winners of the funding were chosen by a selection panel led by Ms Murdoch, the artists Simeon Barclay and Mark Wallinger, arts director Polly Staple and writer Sacha Craddock.
Ms Giblin said: "These artists will now be part of our extended family, and part of our programme going forward - it is a great development for our gallery.
"We will adapt to accommodate what the artists need: they can come and work with us, or if they need a messy room for painting, or a tidy space for academic research, we can do that.
"They can work in other parts of Scotland and come in to see us.
"It is a lot of new artists for us and the university - and they will have access to the university, to our archives and our esteemed colleagues, so that is a very exciting prospect for a lot of artists."
She added: "It is not a huge change in how we work, we already work with emerging artists, but it is intensifying it and really taking it to the next level."
Melanie Cassoff, director of the Foundation, said that the five year terms of the grants add a degree of stability to what the galleries will be doing with the emerging artists in the next five years.
She added: "We really hope that what happens is that over the five years, it allows them to really focus and breathe, we really wanted to give the operations some stability. It is saying to the organisations: we trust you to do this.
"The idea for this came after we launched the Freelands Award, and Elizabeth turned to me and said: what's next? What type of programme can we do next to support emerging artists? It has taken two years working on this but we are delighted with the recipients."
Alongside the Freelands Artist Programme, the Foundation will continue it’s annual £100,000 Freelands Award in supporting a mid-career female artist and an institution to produce a large-scale exhibition, with a winner to be announced this autumn.
The winner of the first edition of the Freelands Foundation Award was Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery, to present a solo exhibition by Glasgow-based artist Jacqueline Donachie.
Ms Murdoch, daughter of the newspaper and broadcasting magnate Rupert Murdoch, is founder and chair of the Freelands Group, which contains the Foundation.
As well as her business interests, she is a council member of Arts Council England, and was a trustee of the Tate between 2008 and 2016.
She was the founder and former chair of Shine Group, and Managing Director of Sky Networks, the programming and marketing division of BSkyB PLC. She began her career in television at the Nine Network in Australia, later joining Fox Television in Los Angeles as Programme and Promotion Manager
for seven stations before she went on to the FX Cable Network as Director of Acquisitions.
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